“It’s not normal that countries like Austria don’t pass on
information about EU citizens who hold accounts there,” French
minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in an interview broadcast today
on France Info radio. The country “risks being listed as a non-cooperative nation,” he said.

The warning is the latest round of criticism directed at
Austria from within the EU. The nation of 8.5 million people
will find itself isolated if it continues to resist EU moves
toward greater transparency, EU Tax Commissioner Algirdas Semeta
said earlier this week. The bloc has called on states to develop
conditions under which nations may be black listed.

Austria is ready for talks with the EU and the U.S. on data
sharing, “but these negotiations can’t be a one-way street,”
Finance Minister Maria Fekter said today. Transparency should
also be expected from authorities in the U.K. and U.S. where
rules of incorporation also enable tax evasion and money
laundering, she said.

Austria will join Luxembourg in talks over an automatic
exchange of data about non-resident accounts, Social Democratic
Chancellor Werner Faymann said this week. While Luxembourg’s
Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said the country will start
exchanging information in 2015, Austria hasn’t given a date. The
two countries have previously vetoed attempts to harmonize taxes
on savings.

The discussion about bank secrecy in Austria takes place in
an election year. The conservative People’s Party opposes an
automatic exchange of all data, saying it wants to protect the
privacy of small depositors. The party has called for a legal
review over whether information on foreign account holders can
be exchanged.

Foreign deposits in Austria from within the euro area
amounted to about 36 billion euros or a little more than a 1/10
of all deposits, according to the latest Central Bank data.